Men: There are certain companies that I refuse to do business with, and I will like to add PAYPAL and plasticjungle to that list.

PAYPAL: I sold an item on Ebay, and someone used a stolen credit card to pay me. They retracked my payment, and after 4 months of investigations I lost my case. So its MY fault that some guy I never met in my life stole a credit card and used it on ebay? UNREAL. Paypal sucks, they are expensive, and I am done with them. I'm considering taking them to small claims court.

PlasticJungle: I bought a discounted gift card from them, and decided to try the E-code instead of the physical card. BIG MISTAKE. The e-code would not work, and it took 2 months to get my money back. Worst customer service in history, I talked to someone from India almost every day until it was resolved.

So in conclusion: I highly recommend staying away from PAYPAL and plasticjungle.com. Ebay also really sucks, but they are best game in town for auctions.

So who do I like? AMERICAN EXPRESS. Best credit card company in the world by far.

Nothing beats Craigs list and getting paid in cash. In march some knucklehead used my debit card in Miami at a gamestop, that took me about 2 months to get my money back. I think from now on I am going to start going to court if I get screwed again. If paypal or Ebay want to send a $200 per hour lawyer to fight me over $50 then good luck to them.

Between paypal and ebay's fee's its ready hard to make any money. Tynan, how about adding a classified section?? call it "Tynans list".....

Paypal is indeed horrible in too many ways to enumerate here. I wholeheartedly share your disdain for Paypal.

Having said that in this case it might not be their fault. There could be more details you left out, but going by the story you laid out, it sounds like you were left to bear the loss just as any brick and mortar or online seller would have to, when accepting credit cards. I don't see this as a Paypal issue from what you describe. This is the way credit card issuers (financial institutions or banks) and the credit card companies (MC, Visa, etc) have set up the game to where they come out on top no matter what. It's just part of the credit card game.

Credit card companies sit at the top of the food chain, and banks have to agree to their terms if they want to issue credit cards. Then come banks on the second tier, who are pretty well protected as well. The customers are protected only because they want people to use the cards and demand all stores accept cards. So who gets left holding the bag? The sellers / stores. When credit cards advertise protection against theft, unauthorized use, blah, blah, in an effort make people comfortable with using and carrying credit cards, the losses are all born by the sellers, not the credit card companies or issuers. The stores / sellers have no choice in the matter because they can't survive without accepting cards, and have to agree to the MC, Visa or whatever CC company rules.

Even on eBay, how difficult is it going to be to sell your items if you didn't accept payment by credit cards (processed by Paypal on eBay). Imagine how many bidders you will have if you only accepted money orders or something. I know this was a choice on eBay many years ago, I don't even know if it's a choice anymore now that eBay has acquired Paypal. Bottom line, it sounds like, once Paypal tracked the transaction to a credit card, then credit card rules come into play, and you as the seller took the hit. With stores, brick and mortar or online, I suspect these losses are ultimately passed on to customers in general, just like shoplifting losses are, in the form of higher prices.

Yet another PayPal horror story for sellers. Why is PayPal so bad? Specifically - if another PayPal like company offered the same services would it be bad also (hinting the problem is with the banks/infrastructure/external system)? If not - they must be holding money to invest like a rebate or some other shady thing to keep them afloat. I just find it hard to believe a company with such a tarnished reputation still keeps on churning.

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I hate Paypal. In the early days of gambling I used Paypal to send money to casinos, and Paypal would occasionally screw me over. They held all deposits to casinos for 30 days so that if the casino went under, players wouldn't get screwed. That was nice of them.

One time I deposited $10k and a casino went under. They never gave me any money despite a number of calls and e-mails. Oh well.

I use paypal when I absolutely have to, and that's it. Google checkout came along, and I was happy about that. I like Adwords, Adsense is ok, Search is awesome, etc. I figure with their "Don't be evil" motto, I'd have nothing to worry about.

Two things strike me about the "what type of credit card" (followed by the inevitable dropdown Visa / MC / Amex / Discover) question we always get on website checkouts:

1) The law of unintended consequences

2) Developers sometimes are lemmings

The reality is, the question"what type of credit card" happened because one programmer somewhere put that into his shopping cart code, and someone copied his code/layout, and then someone copied this code, and before you know it, everyone's asking that question. Hence, the law of unintended consequences.

The irony is, this question is irrelevant! Here's what most people don't know: If a credit card starts with the digit "3" then it's always Amex. If it starts with "4" it's always Visa. "5" is always MasterCard and "6" is always Discover. So if programmers just put a little extra effort into their shopping cart code, they could easily discern what type of card it is. For example, a card that starts with "3715" will be Amex, "4024" will be Visa, etc.